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Contract signed!

Today I just signed the contract with Albany Records for the solo album. All materials have been turned in, and I will be waiting to see the design of the album cover this week. The name of this album is “Folding Time”, merging the past and the present. Looking forward to the next step!

Recording sessions done!

It has been a really busy winter break! Thanks to the support of Carolina Performing Arts, which allowed me to use Memorial Hall and the beautiful Hamburg Steinway. The Grammy Award-winning recording engineer Matthew Snyder flew from California for this album, and he did such a fantastic job for this recording! We are still working on some details for the album. It was such a great experience recording in the beautiful Memorial Hall!

Overview

This project was inspired by my trip to Moscow last year. I was invited to give a recital of music by American composers at the Musical College of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. This cross-cultural experience gave impetus to the idea of recording piano works by American composers Andres and Young. In preparation for recording for Albany Records, I will present their pieces at King’s College in London, and the Liceu, Manresa, and Cervera Conservatories in Spain. As a piano professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, I hope to share these beautiful and interesting pieces with our students, the local communities, and the academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. I will be working with Grammy Award-winning recording engineer and Grammy Award-nominated producer Matthew Snyder in Memorial Hall, home of Carolina Performing Arts, in Chapel Hill, NC. Below are descriptions of the the two pieces:

Timo Andres’s How can I live in your world of ideas?

This fascinating piece takes its name from a cartoon the composer drew during his college years. It starts out as a passacaglia and is slowly transformed by various materials. The sudden outbursts and musical quotations from Chopin and Mozart add a different dimension to the texture. The piece reminds me of the sound world of Brad Mehldau, with fleeting thoughts of the Romantic and the Classical eras. Originally it was written as part of the two-piano work Shy and Mighty. Andres transcribed this movement for solo piano. This will be the first commercial recording of the piece.

“Timothy Andres’s haunting How can I live in your world of ideas? starts with a coolly sophisticated line that he punctures with little bursts. Uneasily elegiac, the piece folds in short quotes from Chopin and Mozart without becoming cute or emptily postmodern. It exudes melancholy, a sense of loss.”
Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 5/27/2011

Phil Young’s Reflection on a Tang Poem (Commissioned in 2014)

The music was inspired by a famous Chinese poem “Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night” by a Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ji. Haunted by the poem’s profound melancholy, Chinese-American composer Phil Young attempts in his music to capture the subtle mood and vivid imagery depicted in the poem: the moon, the frosty night sky, the cawing crows, the river, the boat, and the center figure – a fisherman in solitude. The use of pentatonic-scale based modes derived from its quartal and quintal harmonies enrich its ancient Chinese music flavor, while its light flowing texture invests the music with a translucent quality reminiscent of ancient Chinese brush painting.

The stark and desolate two-note motive presented in the main theme is later elaborated into much more lyrical melodies. The thematic development is enriched by configurations that give the hint of Chinese bamboo flute playing and string plucking on a Qing (an ancient Chinese stringed instrument). After the dramatic climax, the music returns to its initial gloom, as the night bell strikes again with its sound swept away on a breeze of airy arpeggios that dissolve in silence.

Project Media

Excerpt from Timo Andres’s Home Stretch (Nonesuch Records)

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Timo Andres, piano, the Metropolis Ensemble, Released on 7/30/14.
The concepts of this piece and the piano writing bear similarities to the piece I will be recording.

“The piece is in three large sections which gradually accelerate: beginning in almost total stasis, working up to an off-kilter dance with stabbing accents, and ushering in a sturm-und-drang cadenza which riles itself up into a perpetual-motion race to the finish.” -Andres

Lament for Violin and Piano by Phil Young

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Jonathan Wei, Violin, Jia Yi Shi, Piano, recorded in Aug, 2013. It showcases the composer’s innovative ways to incorporate Chinese folk elements. “This music was inspired by the performance of the folklore storytellers in the mountain area of Yunnan province on my visit to China. I was deeply touched by their extremely expressive way of storytelling, in a form mixed with speaking and singing. The undulating melodic line is frequently punctuated by sudden pulses and gestures carried on between moods of vociferation and supplication. ” -Young

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.1 (Movement I)

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“Like so many young pianists, she has a flawless technique, but she possesses qualities that many of the others don’t, particularly her way of incorporating the most difficult technical passages into the ongoing musical discourse and a long view of the music in terms of structure. She also has a gorgeous piano tone… A first-rate…